Why would you honor Australia’s Covid lockdown enthusiasts?

Whatever you think of all that happened in the Covid years, and how the experience scarified so many and even compelled us to question the solidity of democratic institutions and values throughout the West, most of us simply want to forget. The Covid time is like a relationship gone bad: it’s easier to cope by burying it and moving on. In Australia this week, however, unpleasant reminders of the dark Covid time resurfaced in an unexpected place: the national King’s Birthday honors list.

What a face-slapping insult Andrews’s gong is to Victorians

Since dispensing with imperial honors several decades ago, the highest civilian honor here is to be appointed by the King as a Companion of the Order of Australia. It’s an award that is given, according to its official criteria, for “eminent achievement and merit of the highest degree in service to Australia or humanity at large.” Typical recipients are top medical researchers, judges, philanthropists and the greatest of Australia’s great and good. While the likes of former prime ministers also figure, these appointments are usually universally approved and applauded on their merit.

Not this list, however. It is hugely controversial because it includes two recently retired Labor state premiers, Western Australia’s Mark McGowan and Victoria’s Daniel Andrews.

These are not just any former politicians. As their citations for their honors highlighted, McGowan and Andrews made their name leading the resistance to Covid in their respective states, contributing to Australia’s generally better than world average performance in preventing Covid-related incidence and deaths. In doing so, however, they both, and especially Andrews, presided over some of, if not the most, extreme and draconian anti-Covid regimes anywhere in the world.

In Western Australia, Labor’s McGowan not only made a virtue of a “state versus state, mate versus mate” mentality in combating Covid, but rode a wave of popular enthusiasm for it that won him an electoral victory against the opposition Liberals on a scale British prime minister Rishi Sunak may well face next month. It was McGowan’s decision to shut Western Australia completely off from the rest of the country, using the state’s geographical isolation to advantage to keep local Covid cases and deaths unusually low. In the process, however, he effectively demonized all Australians “back east” as contagion carriers, and showed little compassion for people and families forced apart when loved ones in his state were sick and dying.

But McGowan’s Covid failings are minor compared to those of fellow Labor premier Daniel Andrews.

What a face-slapping insult Andrews’s gong is to Victorians. In the crucial Covid year, 2020, Andrews presided over the most repressive Covid regime imaginable, yet did so with a combination of authoritarianism and incompetence. That year, over 800 Victorians died from Covid-linked causes, many in a second wave of infections that was probably driven by the virus being let out of hotel quarantine of international arrivals by, allegedly, bonking bouncers among other causes. Fatal outbreaks devastated care homes. By contrast, no other state, including the most populous state of New South Wales, exceeded double figures that year.

The Victorian capital Melbourne infamously became the most locked-down city in the world, spending 262 days under Covid siege. The city and large swathes of the wider Victorian population placed under curfew and confined to within three miles of their homes. Tower blocks of council houses were surrounded by armed police. Melbourne itself barricaded from the rest of the state by a police-enforced “Ring of Steel” road blocks. Families cruelly isolated from seriously ill and aged loved ones. Draconian mask and vaccine mandates. Public shaming, at Andrews’s interminable daily press briefings, for those who dared defy his edicts.

And that’s even before getting started on Andrews’s absurd additional citation for his services to Victoria’s parliament — a parliament he shut down during Covid as a non-essential service, and in which he treated any opposition with contempt.

It’s therefore no wonder that McGowan and, especially, Andrews being honored for their efforts has caused outrage in Australia. Relatives of elderly Melburnians who died, isolated and alone, at Covid’s height, have lambasted Andrews’s award. Melbourne’s Herald-Sun newspaper ran a reader poll that found 95 percent of respondents opposed the honor. One of Andrews’s predecessors, former Liberal premier Jeff Kennett, wrote, “To my knowledge not only has Mr. Andrews not done any eminent community service, but he has also abjectly failed any objective test on the matters for which he received the recognition.” Quite.

Not everyone opposes the former premiers’ gongs. Even today, the personality cults of Andrews and McGowan lauds them both, and their acolytes gushingly praise and defend them on social media for keeping their people safe, having the courage to lead as they saw necessary, and doing what they had to in the face of as yet unknown dangers. 

To many others, however, awarding Australia’s top civil honor to the two former premiers for service to public health is like honoring Lucrezia Borgia for her services to dinner parties, or Boris Johnson for services to after-work office drinks.

As the white-hot Covid experience cools and fades into the past, it’s becoming clear how much social and economic damage was done to both Victoria and Western Australia. The farce of the Order of Australia council so lavishly honoring two of the central political figures who, in their determination to go even harder than many experts thought wise, and who so willingly trampled on the rights and liberties of their own people, is an insult. Had either McGowan or Andrews showed even a skerrick of self-awareness, their honors should never have been accepted.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.